Darkness Within
by IronRaven
Summary: There is something that Beast Boy dreads to think of: What if he'd had gone with Terra? What would they be like as a couple, as Slade's apprentices? A side of Garfield we've never seen.


Darkness Within  
by IronRaven

Teen Titans, the Justice League, their member characters, related geographical locations, and themes are the property of DC Comics. In particular, I use the versions animated at the direction of Paul Dini and Bruce Timm.

You know, I can't see Slade passing up a two-for-one sale on Titans.

---

Green, grey and black, the shape moved silently through the forested hills. He was lean, strong, with fangs and claws. Everything about him said he was predator. A dark orange insignia decorated his armoured chest. He called himself Changeling now. He was a man, not a boy. He was person, not a beast. It had taken him a while to realize that his so-called friends had never really seen him that way, it took being loved to show what he really was. His mate had shown him the path to greatness. He had joined her, and their master, thier alpha, willingly.

It had taken him a while to adjust to the suit, but as he learned to use it, he learned it gave him power. He was stronger and faster now than he had been before- now he could catch bullets if he had an armoured glove on. At least the slow ones. It helped control pain, kept him comfortable, helped him heal quickly if injured. It also gave him access to it's library. He didn't have conscious access to the information, but he knew things intuitively. And the suit let him communicate with his mate without speaking. He could sense her emotions, share thoughts with her, even if they were simple ones. The suits made them one with each other, in perfect coordination. The suit covered his body and legs, with armour around his lower arms. Fingerless gloves let him use his claws in his human form; a black cravat covered his hair and forehead, pirate-wise with long tails, leaving his ears bare.

The mission was a simple one, but one that would make a lot of people sit up and take notice. Kidnap an important person, kill his bodyguards, and ask a fifty billion dollar ransom. Changeling snorted- the President wasn't worth that much, but Master figured the man was.

He'd already flown over the fence; no one had designed a security system yet that could defeat him and his mate. She was standing by near the fence line on the other side of the Retreat, along with fifty combat droids. Stealing the 18 wheeler a few days before had been childsplay. Right now, the robots would be creeping towards the perimeter. He knew had plenty of time as he took his human form to lay sabotage charges in their place.

Retreating to a treetop lookout, he waited until he felt the mental thrum that his suit passed on. She had sent the droids into the attack. There would be no need to communicate when they encountered resistance, the guards would do that for him. He didn't have long to wait. He needed to get into position. Lost in the chaos of running Marines and federal agents, a sparrow sprinted for the helipad, turning into a fruit fly as it approached the green and white helicopter.

---

The President of the United States was a powerful man, whose sleep was appropriately powerful. The scream of the emergency sirens were suitably powerful to wake him. He was still groggy and struggling with the alarm clock when four agents filled the room, thier weapons drawn. Two grabbed him by the arms, half carrying, half dragging him out of bed.

"Mister President, the Retreat is under attack, we need to go." They paused long enough to throw an overly long, heavily plated and padded armoured vest on him. The delay was less than a second. To the south, the bang of old fashioned firearms and the hiss-scream of energy weapons mixed.

They left the armoured doorway as one entity, sprinting towards the helicopter that was already spinning up not three hundred meters distant. Their way was marked by even more heavily armed agents, facing outward against attack. The pace picked up when Changeling's charges started to detonate, simulating a mortar or rocket attack. Two agents were already aboard the helo, grabbing their charge and dragging him aboard, physically throwing him into a seat next to the Air Force officer with the briefcase. Two more agents jumped aboard as the crew chief slammed the door shut with a clang. An instant latter, the pilot pulled up on the collective and twisted the throttle to emergency power, approaching the maximum g-force rating of the airframe as the turbines screamed. The commnet crackled, "POTUS is airborne."

The agents who stayed behind took up a perimeter around the residence. Others were leading the family into the underground shelter that had once been designed to protect against fallout. Like a herd of elephants, they would be protect thier charges at all cost. They paid no attention to the blacked out shape in the sky, other than the missile team that was looking for any aircraft that might attack the helicopter. In moments, it was lost among the forested hills of Maryland.

The small green worm that had been inching up the side of the helicopter's cabin suddenly curled back on itself, and seemed to expand explosively. Changeling dropped to the canom floor in a crouch, his arms crossing and uncrossing with mongoose speed. Each of the Secret Service agents gurgled wetly, a shuriken deep in each of their throats. The blades had been grooved, and an enzymically-bound neurotoxin imbedded in each grooves. So long as they stayed dry, the razor sharp blades could be handled. Once wetted with blood, the effects stripped the nervous system of the chemicals used to transmit information from cell to cell, and were transmitted along those pathways in a cascading pattern. In less than two eyeblinks, the agents were nothing more than puppets made of meat, without string to hold them up as their nervous systems ceased to function.

An almost casual backhand slap across the military officer's throat shattered the trachea instantly, painfully strangling the unarmed man, as Changeling dropped the helicopter's crew chief with a slim dart pistol in his right hand. Two more darts took care of the pilot and copilot, each loaded with the toxin used on the agents. Changeling calmly returned the dart pistol to the holster on his chest as something slammed into the rotor blades, shattering the carbon fiber spars and wrenching the aircraft around. In a few seconds, anyone left here would be squashed flatter than a pancake. He threw back the sliding door that ran along one side of the fuselage. "Come with me, Mr. President. Or die- it's your choice."

Not waiting for the politician to answer, Changeling grabbed the man by the front of his shirt with one hand as the claws on the other shredded the safety restraints, and tossed him through the hole. The hostage was still shrieking as Changeling calmly stepped through the doorway onto the granite slab that had matched spin and fall rates. In the very center of the rock stood his mate, her blond mane streaming as she pulled them away from the doomed aircraft. They broke out of the spiral, and climbed as the firest shook with a multi-ton 'whump'. Changeling stooped to hogtie their guest, then took a remote from his belt, triggering the charges he'd put in the helicopter and on the fuel tanks at the Retreat. The fires would confuse things for a while, until the "authorities" were sure their hostage hadn't cooked in the flames.

They had neither enough heat or metal for missiles to home on, and trying to make a gun run was suicide against an airborne Geomancer. Only her mate called her 'Terra' anymore, and only in private, or their master when she had badly erred. In public, Changeling called her 'Geo'. She was laughing as she detached several handfuls of gravel, each small stone accelerating at the speed of thought to greet the fighters that stood guard in the sky. The stones struck the interceptors in swarms, each one nearly chewing the cockpits and crews in half as they tried to outguess her evasive maneuvers and get into position to use thier cannons.

"Please observe that the seatbelt and no smoking lights are lit, Mr. President. In the event of an in-flight emergency, you will be blaimed. There is no in-flight movie, as the pilot has ADD, and we don't want to distract her." Making sure that their hostage was secured to the eyebolt sunk in the surface of their conveyance, Changeling stood and hugged Geo from behind, nuzzling against her. He kissed the back of her head, just below the strap of her goggles. She was taller, and it was mostly legs. He liked legs. "Everything went OK on your end? How are you feeling?" It was a foolish question; he'd have known if she was hurt, and Mr. President would be hamburger if that happened.

"I'm hungry." The blond craned her neck, kissing her mate on the cheek. "After we get back, how about some steaks?"

"Nice and rare, with corn and a nice spinach salad?" Changeling patted the soft swell of Geo's belly. This was going to be her last job for a while, Master had said so as soon as she had started to show. Changeling had wanted that as soon as it was official. "Sounds good to me; how does it sound in there?"

Geo snorted back on a giggle. "You know better than to make me laugh while flying. So you like Kori?"

"Yeah, I like it." Changeling nodded. Starfire had been the only Titan who'd been treated as badly as they had, and she had been too naïve about humans to understand. She hadn't wanted to fight them, but Robin had made her. They did mourn her, they hadn't wanted to kill her, unlike the other Titans. "I think she'd have liked it, and it works whether we have a boy or a girl."

"What if it's a puppy?"

---

**Author's Notes:**  
If Beast Boy had joined Terra and gone over to Slade in Betrayal, the two would have made a gruesomely effective team. And while Slade would have had the remote control abilities still, I don't think he would have needed to use it on them. All that he's have to do with BB is "prove" that the others have been holding him back, and that they don't think of him as a person but as a pet. Terra's screwed up enough as is. She could be controlled through BB, and vice versa. And the Titans... The Titans would have disappeared.

And even though I dislike the man, I don't actually suggest kidnapping the President, or in any other way harming him. This is a work of fiction. For those in the federal government who aren't sure what that means, it means this is make belive, made up, not real. Besides, for the past 20 years, the selection of the vice president has mostly focused on the likelyhood he'd be worse, so it there would be fewer people wanting to try something like this.


End file.
